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Tzeporah Berman on Resisting Climate Change

Tzeporah Berman, Author and Environmental Activist

Interviewed on September 5, 2014 by Monica Pohlmann.

Pohlmann: What keeps you up at night?

Berman: Canada is now doing less on climate change and has a weaker regulatory system to address environmental threats than any other industrialized country. In the last two years, dozens of laws that protect our air, water, and biodiversity have been gutted or removed. The Fisheries Act no longer offers habitat protection, that is, we protect fish but not where they live. The Water Act no longer protects the water. These changes were made to remove impediments to the expansion of oil and gas exploration. The oil and gas sectors are having an unprecedented influence on the development of policy at a time when protecting the environment is crucial to the future stability of our economy and our climate.

We’re living at a tipping point. In the last two years, global investment in renewable energy technologies has exceeded everyone’s wildest dreams. But we are banking our economic future on oil and gas resources that are going to become stranded assets, and so we will be behind the eight-ball in developing economic options. Our economic stability in the future is directly linked to our capacity to limit fossil fuel development now. For every dollar we spend today on developing fossil fuel, we will spend four dollars in 2020 on dealing with the results of climate change, including extreme weather, floods, and immigration.

Every day, pollution in Canada is going up instead of going down. Our national trajectory is the opposite of what it should be, and we’re out of step with most of the international community. Emissions in the US are going down, and they are dramatically increasing their spending on renewable energy. We are not. Our government refuses to talk about climate change and has systematically shut down much of the climate science in the country. It’s not just that we’re not acting on climate change; we don’t even have a process to have a conversation about it right now.

Democracy only thrives if you have transparency, information, and participation. All three of those things are being restricted right now in Canada. The public’s ability to participate in the decisions that affect our future has been dramatically limited. If you want to speak or send a letter to the National Energy Board on an issue, you have to fill out an 11-page form and be approved. During regulatory reviews, citizens and experts are not allowed to talk about the impact of proposed projects on climate change. These draconian restrictions make approvals much easier for industry. What we’re seeing in Canada is that oil corrodes: it’s corroding our pipelines and it’s corroding our democracy.

Pohlmann: What energizes you?

Berman: The increasing role that First Nations are playing in the public dialogue on a range of issues. Many First Nations communities and leaders are tired of not being listened to and of having these oil and gas projects pushed on them. First Nations are fighting for their traditional territories, for their traditional way of life, and, as one of the chiefs said to me earlier this summer, in many ways for their lives.

In their advertising, the oil companies say the pipelines are nation-building projects. But what they are building is a nation of resistance. They are connecting people across constituencies and waking people up to the climate and health implications of different policies. The best antidote for fear or depression is engagement, and we’re seeing that in spades across the country. When I started running campaigns, the focus was on how many people you could get around your kitchen table. Now I’m meeting young organizers who can connect to tens of thousands of people in seconds. They have an enormous amount of information at their fingertips, and they’re connected in ways we never imagined possible. That changes the impact we as individuals and as groups can have.

Pohlmann: If things have turned out badly in 20 years, what would Canada look like?

Berman: A dramatic increase in forest fires and beetle infestations will destroy the majority of our intact boreal forests. We’ll be dealing with dramatic immigration from all over the world, but predominantly from Southeast Asia and Central Africa. Within the next 20 years, 30% of the population of Southeast Asia will lose their homes as a result of sea-level rise. A much larger population will strain the capacity of our cities, which will also be under extreme pressure due to flooding and extreme weather. Food prices for most crops will be triple to quadruple what they are today.

Pohlmann: If things have gone well over the next 20 years, what will Canada look like?

Berman: A high-speed rail network will connect major corridors across the country. There will be a dramatic increase in public transit, cycling, and walking and a dramatic decrease in the number of cars in urban centres. More companies like Facebook will move to Canada and build their data centres here. Canada will make a big investment in renewable energy resources and in the capacity to export clean energy to the United States. We’ll see a rise in the generation of tidal energy on both coasts and of geo-thermal energy, especially out of Alberta. More households will produce their own energy and feed that energy back to the grid. All of that will mean a democratization of energy and of the economy: if no one owns the inputs and everyone can generate the energy to fuel society, that changes who holds power.

Pohlmann: What important decisions are coming up for Canada?

Berman: The 2015 election: I think it is going to change the face of Canada. A couple of years ago, I had a conversation with an elderly European diplomat during the United Nations climate talks in South Africa. With tears in his eyes, he said to me, “I’ve been a diplomat for 35 years, and for many of the issues that I have worked on, my partners were the Canadians. This has changed. I don’t understand, what’s happening to Canada?” It was this visceral moment when I thought, I want to be proud of Canada again. We’re the country that helped heal the hole in the ozone layer. We need to decide if we’re going to be the people who lead the world on sustainability and social justice and other intransigent problems. I think we are.

From 1870 to 1996, more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were placed in residential schools and forbidden to speak their language and practice their culture. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) estimates there are 80,000 former students living today, and that the ongoing impact of residential schools are a major contributor to challenges facing modern Aboriginal populations.

Canada’s TRC is one of many commissions worldwide to undertake revealing and resolving past wrongdoings, mostly by governments. Other examples include:

South Africa

In 1996, President Nelson Mandela authorized a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to study the effects of apartheid in South Africa. The commission allowed victims of human rights violations to give statements about their experiences, but also allowed perpetrators of violence to request amnesty from criminal prosecution.

Argentina

The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, initiated in 1983, investigated human rights violations, including 30,000 forced disappearances, committed during the Dirty War.

Guatemala

The Historical Clarification Commission was created in 1994 in an effort to reconcile Guatemala after a 36-year civil war. The commission issued a report in 1999 which estimated that more 200,000 people were killed or disappeared as a result of the conflict.

In June, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission released 94 “calls to action” to “redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation.”

The scope of recommendations range from child welfare to education to Indigenous language rights, and has recommendations targeted for private and public spheres of Canadian life alike. The document calls upon law schools in Canada to require all students to take a course in Aboriginal people and the law, for example. Notably, the document calls upon the federal government to appoint a public inquiry into the causes of, and remedies for, the disproportionate victimization of Aboriginal women and girls.

Canada’s employment statistics are much better now than they were 20 years ago. In 2012 for example, 61.8% of working-age Canadians were employed as opposed to 58.7% in 1995. The unemployment rate has gone down from 9.5% in 1995 to 6.8% in 2014. Youth unemployment has gone down too, from 16.1% to 13.5% in the same time period. The outlier in these trends is labour force participation, or the amount of working-age Canadians who are either employed, or unemployed and looking for work. Right now, participation is at the lowest rate since the year 2000, mainly because the “baby-boomer” generation is moving towards retirement. Read more about that here.

Housing preferences among Millennials, however, tend towards smaller, higher density housing close to activities, signs that changing economic realities and the generation shift will create more demand for housing in compact, walkable neighbourhoods.

Belfry-Munroe suspects that youth disinterest has to do with political parties. “There’s been a lack of engagement one-on-one with people since the 1970s, and a greater focus on mass media and now things like social media,” says Belfry-Munroe. “The other thing is that parties have become uncool,” she continues, “and I think that getting excited about the election without parties is like getting excited about the World Series without the teams. If you weren’t excited about the Blue Jays, you would not be concerned about the World Series.”

To extend this analogy, young Canadians currently aren’t even interested in baseball. What could work to change this would be getting other types of fans — soccer, golf, darts, you name it — engaged in baseball due to their passion for sports in general. Politically, this is the bridge that is missing for youth. The Blue Jays don’t matter if youth are removed from sports. Similarly, political parties and leaders would have little relevance if youth are removed from electoral politics.

“The generational effect is even larger [than the life cycle effect]. At the same age, turnout is 3 or 4 points lower among baby boomers than it was among pre-baby boomers, 10 points lower among generation X than it was among baby boomers, and another 10 points lower among the most recent generation than it was among generation X at the same age.”

— An excerpt from “Why Was Turnout So Low?” in Anatomy of a Liberal Victory by Andre Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, Richard Nadeau and Neil Nevitte.

Rock The Vote also published a Youth Voter Strategy Report in 2007 that compiled many scholarly findings on this subject. You can find that here.

According to Elections Canada, “people are less likely to cast a ballot if they feel they have no influence over government actions, do not feel voting is an essential civic act, or do not feel the election is competitive enough to make their votes matter to the outcome, either at the national or the local constituency level.” Read more here.

The trend of youth voter disengagement persists across much of the developed world. According to the Economist, for example, in 2010 just 44 per cent of people aged 18 to 24 voted in Britain’s general election compared to 76% of those aged 65 and over. America saw its lowest voter turnout ever in its 2014 midterm elections, where just 19.9 per cent of young people voted, compared to an overall turnout rate of 36.4 per cent. This trend tends to change, however, when charismatic politicians reach out to youth. According to Politico, Barack Obama would have lost the 2012 American presidential election without youth voting — overwhelmingly for him. Read more here.